Pinoy WordPress

A couple of weeks ago, I was so excited to see that I had a lot of ‘comments’ for moderation only to find out that they’re all spam – all 43 of them! I then thought, how could comment spam go through if I have the captcha plugin installed? At first, I thought the spammers were deliberately typing in their spam into my blog but when I checked, all the ‘comments’ were actually trackback spam! Now I know how it got through captcha. For those who don’t know, captcha is a wordpress comment plugin that adds a set of characters to type in a small graphic before someone can post a comment.

On the other hand, trackbacks are ‘comments’ that are automatically posted when someone links to your site and ‘pings’ your site. Trackbacks are highly automated and therefore should not pass through captcha. So what spammers do is exploit this loophole to post their spams on people’s blogs hoping that they will be approved OR be automatically approved by the system if moderation of comments is disabled. In my case, comment moderation was turned on so I was able to catch the problem before they were posted on my site.

My next step now was to look for a solution. My first logical solution was to enter common spam words in the Wordpress admin under Options->Discussion. So I went to copy a list of common spam words from the wordpress website and pasted them in the proper place under Options->Discussion. I then waited for a 3 days and to my amazement, trackback spam went down from 10 per day to only 1 per week! Not bad huh? I then tried turning off the captcha plugin to see if it spam goes up but it still stayed at one per week. So I turned off captcha and decided to give it a few more months. So far, comment spam is still down to 1 per week and I find that tolerable enough. So I conclude that this solves my Trackback spam problem. I’ve also included my ‘moderation settings’ in my website for those who want to try my setup in fighting trackback spam.

I heard that the Akismet plugin works better than my method so you can give it a try. The Akismet plugin is already included by default in your wordpress installation. You just need to enable it.

Enjoy!

When to use permalinks and trackbacks? This has been my question before and most likely to be the question of most as well. First, what are trackbacks?

Here’s a useful definition according to wikipedia:

TrackBack is a mechanism for the communication between blogs: if a blogger writes a new entry commenting on, or referring to, an entry found at another blog, and both blogging tools support the TrackBack protocol, then the commenting blogger can notify the other blog with a “TrackBack ping“; the receiving blog will typically display summaries of, and links to, all the commenting entries below the original entry. This allows for conversations spanning several blogs that readers can easily follow.

Blogging software that supports the TrackBack protocol displays a “TrackBack URL” along with every entry. This URL is used by the commenting blogger, whose software will send XML-formatted information about the new entry to this URL. Some blogging tools are able to discover these TrackBack URLs automatically, others require the commenting blogger to enter them manually.

The TrackBack specification is due to Six Apart who first implemented it in their Movable Type blogging software in 2002. It has since been implemented in most other blogging tools. Six Apart started a working group in February 2006 to improve the Trackback protocol and have it potentially approved as an internet standard by the IETF. One notable blogging tool that does not support trackback yet is Blogger.

Some individuals or companies have abused the TrackBack feature to insert spam links on some blogs (see sping). This is similar to comment spam but avoids some of the safeguards designed to stop the latter practice. As a result, TrackBack spam filters similar to those implemented against comment spam now exist in many weblog publishing systems. Many blogs have stopped using trackbacks because dealing with spam became too burdensome.

Aside from trackbacks, there is also what we call a pingback which can also be found in wikipedia. Essentially, pingbacks and trackbacks are the same.

So when do we use trackbacks? With the advent of modern day blogging tools such as Wordpress, the issue is actually no longer an issue since wordpress automatically automatically detects the trackback URL if there is any on the page that you link to.

Here’s another URL that might help though it’s for MovableType. But it does show the “sense” in using trackbacks.

Lastly, in wordpress, you can force pinging of trackback URLs by entering them in the “Trackbacks” field when you write a new post. The trackbacks field can be usually found below the “editor” when posting.

Hope this helps!